Author: Antti Hyry

And he left the road

And he left the road, walking straight ahead across fields and ditches, past barns and through bushes growing in the ditch. From the fields he went on to the forest, climbed a fence, walked past spruce and pine, juniper bushes and rocks, and came to the edge of a forest and to the swamp. He crossed the swamp, going through small groves of trees if they happened to be in his way. He went on walking rapidly across rivers, through forests, over seas and lakes, and through villages, and finally he came back to the very spot from which he had started walking straight ahead.

In the same way he walked at a right angle to the direction he had first taken and after that, a few times between those two directions. Every time he would start from the road and in the end would always come back to the road in the same direction as when he’d started off. On his rounds, after walking a bit, he would stop and look up every now and then, and each time he looked he would see the sky and sun or the moon and stars. More…

About the author

Antti Hyry (1931–2016) published his first collection of short stories in 1958, the same year he graduated with an engineering degree. His engineering career was put on hold when he became a full-time writer. Hyry went on to write over twenty books and won numerous awards for his works, which frequently deal with rural life and people. He was a five-time recipient of the Finnish State Literature Award, and in 2009 he won the Finlandia Prize for his novel Uuni (‘The Oven’).